Mein Camp

“Brüno.”

Sacha Baron Cohen plays Brüno, the Austrian fashionista with the big umlaut, in a film directed by Larry Charles.Credit PABLO LOBATO

The task of making art out of camp—of crossing the borders of taste without hindrance or shame—has fallen of late to Sacha Baron Cohen. To find a successor to Borat, the genteel Kazakh adventurer whose exploits we followed in 2006, was never going to be easy, but somehow Baron Cohen came up with a character of even higher delirium. I refer, of course, to Julien, the loquacious lemur voiced by Baron Cohen in “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa,” who takes the sexual indeterminacy of ringtails to places we never dreamed it could go. How do you cap that?

Well, the answer is to don the hat of a Hasidic Jew, team it with a pair of wide black shorts, stroll down an Israeli street, and get pursued by a furious posse of the faithful. That is one of the stunts that are staged in the course of “Brüno,” the latest film from Larry Charles, the director of “Borat.” The new creation is Brüno, the Austrian fashionista with the big umlaut, played by Baron Cohen as a filleted, feather-cut popinjay. He has a hyena’s giggle and a long, swaying step that contains just the tiniest hint of goose. I was surprised by how little mileage the filmmakers get out of Brüno’s origins; the best national gag—that all he craves is to live “ze Austrian dream: ‘get a job, find a dungeon, raise ein family in it’ ”—comes not from the film but from his Twitter site.

Brüno is the host of “Funkyzeit,” a very à la mode show on Austrian TV, but is fired after an unfortunate Velcro incident on the catwalk. “For the second time in a century, the vorld has turned on Austria’s greatest man, just because he tried something different,” he says. It’s a lethal line, spinning self-pity out of cretinism, and, at moments like this, with innocence cozying up to indifference, you realize what a savage, Swiftian assault Baron Cohen could, if he put his mind to it, launch at our moral unknowingness. But the line is spoken in voice-over, not as part of a dramatic dialogue, and what the rest of “Brüno” demonstrates, to one’s growing disappointment and dismay, is a vehemently gifted man putting his body to it and leaving his mind behind.

The plot, if that is the word for a headlong swarm of skits, finds our man trotting the globe in a desperate lunge for celebrity. Hence that trip to Israel, bringing peace to what he calls “the Middle Earth.” He even gets Israeli and Palestinian officials together at the same table, holding their hands while he sings a song of (though not in) perfect harmony. It’s horribly awkward, sure, yet the actual questions he puts rely on tired malapropism—mistaking Hamas for hummus, say—and, if you look at the faces of the negotiators, you don’t see dumb humiliation. You see tough, weathered types who have met many dunderheads in their time, and this fop is no different—he’s nothing to them, a speck, and they’ll brush him off the instant he leaves the room.

Although that doesn’t matter to Brüno, it matters a lot to “Brüno,” which aims, like “Borat,” to cut a chastening swath. Its main target area, as before, is the United States, or, as Baron Cohen sees it, a vast barrel writhing with shootable fish. Here are some of his victims: golden-blond P.R. floozies from California, good ol’ hunting boys from Alabama, and a couple of Southern pastors who specialize in converting homosexuals. Does anything strike you about that list? So clearly have they been picked for their mockability that Baron Cohen is left with nothing to prove; a genuinely bold interviewer might find that they did have something to say, but that is beyond his brief. Indeed, the first pastor slightly floors Brüno with a clear, uncontroversial statement of his belief in Jesus, whereupon Brüno takes emergency action in the only way he knows. He talks dirty: “You didn’t put any voodvind instruments up your Auschwitz?”

This kind of inquiry, fairly typical of the film, is in every sense below the belt. First, it suggests that Baron Cohen, having sneaked his way into a discussion, seldom has the nerve to keep his side of the bargain, preferring to cut things short with a gibe. Second, his comfort zone of comic reference, predicated on the discomfort of others, begins at the waistline and ends at the kneecaps. In his relentless, unmistakably Anglo-Freudian insistence on the genital and the anal, Baron Cohen takes the double entendre and strips it to a single one, placing in full view what used to be a smirking aside. Forget satire; this guy doesn’t want to scorch the earth anymore. He just wants to swing his dick.

I’m not joking, but Baron Cohen is. There really is a scene where, with a focus group watching clips of Brüno’s show (which he hopes will screen on American TV), he resorts to flaunting his member—or, for all I know, a schlong double—and twirling it at the camera, like the baton of a majorette. Then, presumably with a little help from C.G.I., it speaks. You could defend this as an update on the dog tattoo, inscribed on Harpo’s torso, that suddenly barks at Groucho in “Duck Soup,” but that was a wild visual pun—listen to the flesh of a mute!—whereas you can’t help feeling, as “Brüno” proceeds, that it is opting for the shock of the gross-out whenever inspiration wilts. To be fair, the two young women beside me howled at the talking penis (not a bad emblem of the average male, they would say), and, if I had tried to explain that the Marx Brothers—sowers of extreme sedition, like Baron Cohen—sustained an entire career of ignobility without displaying a single erection, they would not have believed me. Even so, there was something forced in the women’s laughter, as if they wanted to banish any suspicion of prudery, and to prove themselves far too cool for disgust.

Could that be Baron Cohen’s cunning plan? Might he actually be in the business of revealing our cauterized senses, and the wound where our finer judgments are meant to be? A nice idea, but I’m afraid that “Brüno” feels hopelessly complicit in the prejudices that it presumes to deride. You can’t honestly defend your principled lampooning of homophobia when nine out of every ten images that you project onscreen comply with the most threadbare cartoons of gay behavior. A schoolboy who watches a pirated DVD of this film will look at the prancing Austrian and find more, not fewer, reasons to beat up the kid on the playground who doesn’t like girls. There is, on the evidence of this movie, no such thing as gay love; there is only gay sex, a superheated substitute for love, with its own code of vulcanized calisthenics whose aim is not so much to sate the participants as to embarrass onlookers from the straight—and therefore straitlaced—society beyond.

How efficient, though, is embarrassment as a comic device? It’s a quick hit, and it corrals the audience on the side of smugness; but its victories are Pyrrhic, and it tends to fizzle out unless held in by a plot—as it was in “Fawlty Towers,” which, from its base on the English seaside, fathomed the most embarrassable race on earth. Baron Cohen, in exporting his japes, comes up against a people much less devoted to the wince. I realized, watching “Borat” again, that what it exposed was not a vacuity in American manners but, more often than not, a tolerance unimaginable elsewhere. Borat’s Southern hostess didn’t shriek when he appeared with a bag of feces; she sympathized, and gently showed him what to do, and the same thing happens in “Brüno,” when a martial-arts instructor, confronted by a foreigner with two dildos, doesn’t flinch. He teaches Brüno some defensive moves, then adds, “This is totally different from anything I’ve ever done.” Ditto the Hollywood psychic—another risky target, eh?—who watches Brüno mime an act of air-fellatio and says, after completion, “Well, good luck with your life.” In both cases, I feel that the patsy, though gulled, comes off better than the gag man; the joke is on Baron Cohen, for foisting indecency on the decent. The joker is trumped by the square.

“Brüno” ends appallingly, with a musical montage of Sting, Bono, Elton John, and other well-meaners assisting mein Host in a sing-along. Here’s the deal, apparently: if celebrities aren’t famous enough for your liking (Ron Paul, Paula Abdul), or seem insufficiently schooled in irony, you make vicious sport of them, but if they’re A-listers, insanely keen to be in on the joke, they can join your congregation. Would Baron Cohen dare to adopt a fresh disguise and trap Sting in some outlandish folly, or is he now too close a friend? To scour the world for little people you can taunt, and then pal up with the hip and rich: that is not an advisable path for any comic to pursue, let alone one as sharp and mercurial as Baron Cohen. All his genius, at present, is going into publicity, and, in the buildup to this film’s release, he has not put a foot wrong—or, in the case of Eminem, a buttock. But the work itself turns out to be flat and foolish, bereft of Borat’s good cheer: wholly unsuitable for children, yet propelled by a nagging puerility that will appeal only to those in the vortex of puberty, or to adults who have failed to progress beyond it. Call it, at best, a gaudy celebration of free speech, though be advised: before my screening, I had to sign a form requiring me “not to blog, Twitter or Facebook thoughts about the film before 6th July 2009.” A guy pulls down his pants and bares his soul, and we are forbidden to have thoughts? What is this, the Anschluss? ♦